Relinquishing Purse Strings

Orlando Bagwell Leaves Ford Foundation’s JustFilms

Orlando Bagwell of the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative found financing for the Oscar-nominated documentary “How to Survive a Plague.”Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

As a substitute teacher in Boston during the 1970s school-busing crisis there, Orlando Bagwell was attacked by a mob and kicked into the street. He was rescued by a bus driver. Shortly thereafter Mr. Bagwell, a fledgling filmmaker, was hired by public television to work on a piece about a South Boston protester who had changed her mind and was advocating peace. Her son, it turned out, was one of Mr. Bagwell’s attackers.

Great stories, true stories — they’re what Mr. Bagwell has been chasing his whole career.

As a director and producer he has been involved with some of the more influential documentaries made about the civil rights movement and the black American experience, including the landmark television mini-series “Eyes on the Prize” and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. portrait “Citizen King.” In 2004 he joined the Ford Foundation to help it support social-issue filmmaking. Two years ago he helped found the Ford initiative JustFilms, which further focused that effort but kept Mr. Bagwell off the radar — except, of course, to filmmakers who knew where they might find financing.

But in June he plans to exit JustFilms to make his own documentaries once again. He leaves on a decidedly upbeat note: Eight JustFilms movies screened at last month’s Sundance Film Festival; another project, “How to Survive a Plague,” is an Oscar nominee for best documentary. JustFilms projects are in production around the world, and the social-justice documentary has arguably never had more cachet. Likewise Mr. Bagwell.

A dinner turned testimonial at Sundance had its honoree squirming, and last week Darren Walker, the foundation’s vice president’s for education, creativity and free expression, said: “It’s hard not to be enthusiastic about Orlando, if you care about social-justice documentary. He’s the pre-eminent person in the field today.”

Mr. Bagwell, he said, had changed the foundation’s thinking, leading in 2010 to a commitment of $50 million over five years and giving him a way to collaborate more directly with other Ford programs on human rights, economic equality and criminal justice. One recent result was “Gideon’s Army,” Dawn Porter’s debut film about public defenders in the South, which received a rousing response at Sundance last month. Unlike many documentaries at Ford it originated not at JustFilms but in the human rights program.

Kirsten D. Levingston, a program officer working on justice reform, said she brought Ms. Porter and her footage to Mr. Bagwell. Ms. Levingston remembered how Mr. Bagwell keyed into its theme of student debt and how law school graduates saddled with enormous loans can’t afford to devote themselves to the indigent.

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A scene from “How to Survive a Plague.”Credit
William Lucas Walker

“That became a big theme in the film,” Ms. Levingston said, two to three years before it became a topic of news reports. She added: “I think this speaks to the kind of eye he has, both for art and for policy. You hope whoever picks up the baton has the same astute sensibility he has.”

Mr. Bagwell would say the crucial factor is narrative. “A lot of filmmakers want to change the world,” he said at his office at the foundation, overlooking East 43rd Street in Manhattan and decorated with the art and artifacts of years of making films (among them “Malcolm X: Make It Plain,” “Roots of Resistance: The Story of the Underground Railroad” and “Africans in America”).

“But they haven’t done a lot of thinking about the translation of those things into stories,” said the 60-ish Mr. Bagwell, dreadlocks framing his strong face and trimmed beard. If he thinks the topic is promising, Mr. Bagwell can give the filmmaker a grant as small as $50,000 and say, “I think you need to do more research, and when you get that research, don’t send me a proposal, send me a little narrative and tell me how you see this as a story.”

Few people, especially the hundreds of filmmakers turned down each year, would describe Mr. Bagwell as easy.

“You have to get past the stare,” said Jon Else, a filmmaker (“The Day After Trinity,” “Cadillac Desert”) and journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who also worked on “Eyes on the Prize.” “He’s an amazingly warm, really thoughtful person.”

At the same time, “he is not a person uncomfortable in silence,” said Noland Walker, who co-directed Mr. Bagwell’s “Citizen King” (2004). “He’s got this stare where he drops his chin and looks at you in a way that asks: Why are we in the same room?”

Told this, Mr. Bagwell laughed. “It’s terrifying being a first-time filmmaker,” he said. “And they’re showing you work, talking about it, they have a long, long explanation about why they have to do it this way or that way.” He stares “because if I respond in a certain way it would just deflate them,” he said. “I’m searching for words. But I’m not smiling.”

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Orlando Bagwell was a director of “Citizen King” (2004). Now Mr. Bagwell is returning to directing documentaries.Credit
PBS/Photofest

“I think I got it from my father,” Mr. Bagwell added. “My father had a look that could turn you to stone.”

David France got the look. When he pitched what became his film debut, “How to Survive a Plague,” the story of early AIDS activism, “I got that unfocused Orlando gaze that told me he was paying more attention to what was going on inside his head than anything I was saying.”

But Mr. Bagwell let Mr. France talk. And show him footage. “And when the lights came back on, he was there,” Mr. France said. “He saw it.” In addition to throwing the weight of the Ford Foundation behind the film, Mr. Bagwell offered support and feedback throughout the project.

Mr. Bagwell was interested less in history, Mr. France said, than in “the power of activism and the power of the individual to make social change.”

There’s a good of deal of power, as Mr. Walker pointed out, in giving $10 million away each year. Mr. Bagwell sees it instead as a responsibility.

“The big lesson to me is that we’re all so connected,” he said. “There’s nothing happening now that is not affecting each of us individually, emotionally, intellectually, in our pocketbooks. At the same time information is the same way. We can inform one another in the same way. And there’s something going on right now in the field of documentary.”

It’s something he wants to be part of, making his own films. Maybe even applying for the same kind of grants he’s been giving away.